Disaster recovery (DR) is one of most important use cases that we hear from our customers. Having your own DR site in the cloud ready and on standby, without having to pay for the hardware, power, bandwidth, cooling, space and system administration and quickly launch resources in cloud, when you really need it (when disaster strikes in your datacenter) makes the AWS cloud the perfect solution for DR. You can quickly recover from a disaster and ensure business continuity of your applications while keeping your costs down.

Disaster recovery is about preparing for and recovering from a disaster. Any event that has a negative impact on your business’ continuity or finances could be termed a disaster. This could be hardware or software failure, a network outage, a power outage, physical damage to a building like fire or flooding, human error, or some other significant disaster.

In that regard, we are very excited to release Using AWS for Disaster Recovery Whitepaper. The paper highlights various AWS features and services that you can leverage for your DR processes and shows different architectural approaches on how to recover from a disaster. Depending on your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - two commonly used industry terms when building your DR strategy - you have the flexibility to choose the right approach that fits your budget. The approaches could be as minimum as backup and restore from the cloud or full-scale multi-site solution deployed in onsite and AWS with data replication and mirroring.

The paper further provides recommendations on how you can improve your DR plan and leverage the full potential of AWS for your Disaster Recovery processes.

AWS cloud not only makes it cost-effective to do DR in the cloud but also makes it easy, secure and reliable. With APIs and right automation in place, you can fire up and test whether you DR solution really works (and do that every month, if you like) and be prepared ahead of time. You can reduce your recovery times by quickly provisioning pre-configured resources (AMIs) when you need them or cutover to already provisioned DR site (and then scaling gradually as you need). You can bake the necessary security best practices into an AWS CloudFormation template and provision the resources in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). All at the fraction of the cost of conventional DR.

How are you using the cloud for Disaster Recovery today? Please do share your general feedback about DR and any feedback regarding the whitepaper that you might have.

The Amazon Simple Email Service gives you a simple and cost-effective way to send any volume of bulk or transactional email. We send millions of emails on behalf of thousands of Amazon SES customers each and every day.

You can now access Amazon SES through the AWS Management Console. The new SES tab provides you with access to all of the important features of SES (you'll still need to call the Amazon SES API to send your production emails). You don't have to install and configure the Amazon SES command line tools anymore.

The Dashboard allows you to request production access so that you can send email to unverified addresses. You can verify addresses during your testing phase, and you can also view your statistics and limits:

You can also see detailed metrics on your Amazon SES activity:

You can verify new senders by simply entering an email address. A verification email will be sent to the address; when the recipient clicks on a link in the email the address will be marked as verified:

You can also view the list of verified senders and send test emails to them:

I hope you've found this brief tour of the newest tab of the AWS Management Console to be of value.

The DNS entry associated with an Elastic Load Balancer can now return up to eight IP addresses.

IPv6 SupportEarlier this year I announced our support for IPv6 in our US East (Northern Virginia) and EU (Ireland) regions. We are now supporting IPv6 in our Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions. Read my original post to learn more about this much-requested feature.

More MetricsEach Elastic Load Balancer now reports six new metrics to CloudWatch. Two of the metrics provide information about the load balancer; the other four provide information about the instances that are attached to it. These metrics provide you with additional information about the HTTP status codes returned by the load balancer and by the EC2 instances behind it.

The new load balancer metrics report on the number of HTTP 4xx (client error) and 5xx (server error) responses generated within and returned by the load balancer. The metrics are named HTTPCode_ELB_4XX and HTTPCode_ELB_5XX. These metrics were not previously available from the instance logs or through other AWS APIs.

The new instance metrics report on the number of HTTP 2xx (success), 3xx (redirection), 4xx (client error), and 5xx (server error) responses returned by the EC2 instances behind the load balancer. These metrics do not include the responses that were counted in the load balancer metrics described in the previous paragraph.

You can view these metrics in the AWS Management Console. Here's a sample:

Additional IP AddressesA DNS lookup on the DNS name of an Elastic Load Balancer will now return up to eight IP addresses, depending on the current capacity of the load balancer and the number of Availability Zones supported by the load balancer. By providing these additional addresses, clients are able to retry their connection without re-resolving the DNS name. This change will apply to all new Elastic Load Balancers. It will be applied to existing Elastic Load Balancers over the nexte three weeks.

It is a great time to be a software developer with an entrepreneurial mindset. You can get access to development tools, startup resources, and much more at no charge or at a very low cost these days. You don't need to get venture capital or max out your credit cards in order to get started.

Microsoft, an AWS Solution Provider, offers the Microsoft®BizSpark® program to help software startups succeed by giving them access to Microsoft software development tools, connecting them with key industry players, including investors, and providing marketing visibility to help entrepreneurs who are starting a business. As part of this offer, BizSpark offers a select list of Microsoft licenses, including Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2.

We are pleased to announce that you can now import your BizSpark licenses for Windows Server and SQL Server products to AWS and use them to launch Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. You can then run these products on EC2 instances at an hourly cost that has been adjusted to reflect the removal of the license charges. In other words, Windows instances will be billed at the same rate as Linux/Unix under this plan.

Matt Gerber,CEO of managed service provider IT-Lifeline spent some time talking about AWS on camera. Here's the full video:

Matt enumerates the three main benefits that AWS provides him: cost, elasticity, and time to market (sometimes saving 6 months to a year for a new offering). He also talks about security and compliance, and about working with the AWS team. Matt notes that traditional disaster recovery (DR) is a capital-intensive business, and that they'll be able to pass savings of 25-50% on to their customers. He says that the carrying cost for disaster recovery is effectively reduced to zero -- "It doesn't cost us anything to know that that AWS infrastructure is there for when our customers need it for a disaster."

We've pulled together some additional DR and storage resources on our new Backup and Storage page.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (code named "Denali") has a lot of really intriguing features including high availability, columnstore indexes, self-service Business Intelligence, faster full-text search, data visualization, and improved security and compliance. Consult the feature guide for more information.

In order to make it as easy as possible for you to test your applications with this new database, we've worked with Microsoft to create a new EC2 AMI that is preloaded with Windows Server 2008 R2 and the Community Technology Preview 3 (CTP3) of SQL Server 2012. The new AMI is available in all five of the public AWS regions. The AMI IDs are listed here; you can also find them using the AWS Management Console:

Instead of locating some suitable hardware and spending your time downloading and installing nearly 3 GB of code, you can simply launch the AMI and start exploring within five minutes. You will pay only for the EC2 instances that you launch and run; there are no additional software licensing costs.

We have added some nice new features to the Simple Queue Service. You can now use batch operations to send and delete messages with greater efficiency and at a lower cost. You can make any of your queues into a delay queue, and you can also use message timers to set an initial visibility delay on individual messages.

Batch OperationsThe new SendMessageBatch and DeleteMessageBatch functions give you the ability to operate on up to ten messages at a time. You can send individual messages of up to 64 KB (65,536 bytes); however, the sum of the lengths of the messages in a single batch cannot exceed 64 KB. The batch operations are more efficient for you (less network round trips between your application and AWS) and are also more economical since you can now send or delete up to ten messages while paying for just one request.

Delay QueuesYou can now set up any of your queues to be a delay queue. Setting a non-zero value for the queue's DelaySeconds attribute delays each new message's availability within the queue accordingly. For example, if you set the attribute to 120 for one of your queues, messages subsequently posted to it will become visible two minutes (120 seconds) after posting.

Message TimersYou can now set the DelaySeconds attribute on individual messages (using SendMessage) or on batches of messages (using SendMessageBatch). Messsages that have a non-zero delay will not become available until after the delay has elapsed. You could use this new feature to deliver certain messages at predictable intervals. For example, you could send a series of messages with delays of 0, 60, 120, and 180 seconds for receipt at one minute intervals.

Console SupportThe AWS Management Console includes support for Delay Queues and Message Timers. You can create new delay queues by specifying a non-zero Delivery Delay:

Due to an overwhelming response, the live registration for tomorrow's AWS GovCloud Summit has been closed.

We will be streaming the entire event and I invite you to sign up now. The event will feature keynote addresses by GSA CIO Casey Coleman and Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels, customer presentations, how-to sessions, information on FISMA and ITAR compliance, and tracks specifically designed for technical and senior manager audiences.

In typical Amazon fashion, we like to keep the momentum going. We've combined two popular AWS features, Amazon EC2 Spot Instances and the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). You can now create a private, isolated section of the AWS cloud and make requests for Spot Instances to be launched within it. With this new feature, you get the flexibility and cost benefits of Spot Instances along with the control and advanced security options of the VPC.

Based on feedback from customers in the community, we believe this feature will be ideal for use cases like scientific computing, financial services, media encoding, and "big data." As an example, we have received a number of requests from members the scientific community who have been mining petabytes of confidential (e.g. human genome or sensitive customer data) and/or proprietary data (e.g. patentable). Traditionally they have set up their own software VPN connection and launch Spot Instances. Now they can leverage all of the security and flexibility benefits associated with VPC.

We have also heard a number of customers looking for ways to integrate on-premise and cloud solutions, and to burst into the cloud. These customers now can leverage VPC and Spot for a great low cost solution to this "computation gap."

Launching Spot instances into an Amazon VPC is similar to launching Spot instances, but you need to specify the VPC you would like to run your Spot Instances within. Launching Spot Instances into Amazon VPC requires special capacity behind the scenes, which means that the Spot Price for Spot Instances in an Amazon VPC will float independently from those launched outside of Amazon VPC.

The AWS Management Console includes complete support for this new feature combo. You can examine the spot price history for EC2 instances launched within a VPC:

You can use the console's Request Instances Wizard to make a request to launch Spot Instances in any of your VPCs at the maximum price of your choice (just be sure to choose VPC for the Launch Into option):

For more information on using Spot Instances in VPC, please visit the EC2 User's Guide.

If you want to learn more about the ins and outs of Spot Instances, I recommend that you spend a few minutes watching the following videos:

Getting Started With Spot Instances

Deciding on Your Spot Bidding Strategy

How to Manage Spot Instance Interruption

There is also a video coming soon on the how to launch a Spot Instance within VPC, so check back at the Spot Instance web page again soon. I will tweet when it becomes available (please follow me (@jeffbarr) for more details).

As I mentioned, the Spot service has been rapidly evolving, and we would love to get your feedback on the next features you’d love to see. Please feel free to email spot-instance-feedback@amazon.com if you have more feedback. Alternatively, to learn more about Spot, please visit the Spot Instance page for more details.

Are you thinking about kicking off a lean startup and wondering what the buzz is all about? In his new book, The Lean Startup, author and entrepreneur Eric Ries (co-founder of IMVU) outlines key principles of the ideal lean startup:

Customer-centric, rapid iterations on the product.

Application of agile software development methodologies.

Use of platforms enabled by open source and free software.

Because lean startups and the Amazon Web Services go together like chocolate and peanut butter (to overuse a perfectly delicious stereotype), we have set up a special four hour web event to show you how to combine and better understand them. This event is geared toward business founders, aspiring entrepreneurs, and technical founders who want to understand a bit more about the roles of business and technology in the typical lean startup.

The event will start at 10 AM Pacific Time on Thursday, October 27th. We'll have four speakers:

Eric Ries.

Matt Wood, AWS Technical Evangelist.

Matt McIlwain, Venture Capitalist with the Madrona Venture Group.

A top secret lean startup.

The event is free but you need to register in order to view it online.